Celebrated poet Yrsa Daley-Ward will hold a 90-minute class for $10 during the 15th Annual CityLit Festival on Saturday, April 14, 2018 at the University of Baltimore's William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center at 11 W. Mt. Royal Avenue from 2:00 – 3:30pm. The daylong festival, to take place from 9:30am to 5:30pm, where over 75 writers will be represented in 20 sessions, including The New Yorker Staff Writer and former editor of The Paris Review Philip Gourevitch as the keynote speaker. (Click here for more details about the full festival.) Except for the paid Master Class and Critique Sessions, most of the day’s activities are FREE.

This Master Class, entitled “The Way Things Feel”, will be part reading, part instruction, part intimate exchange about Craft & Process, where Yrsa Daley-Ward will engage curious emerging and established writers on a journey of creating truth on the page. Attendees will explore how to bring real-life experiences to the page without freezing.

Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer and poet of mixed West Indian and West African heritage. Born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Yrsa was raised by her devout Seventh Day Adventist grandparents in the small town of Chorley in the North of England. She lives in New York.

After self-publishing her poetry collection bone to major success in 2014, Yrsa Daley-Ward released a new edition, adding 40 new poems exploring sexuality, love, desire, spirituality, and race to the collection with Penguin Books in the fall of 2017.

Photo by Kirill Kozlov

See link below to download a PDF about this class.

Registration is Required!

The cost for the Master Class is a $10, tax-deductible donation to CityLit.

2. In the comment section, note that you are registering for the Master Class

If you have any questions about the Master Class, call CityLit Executive Director Carla DuPree, 410-271-8793.

Praise for Yrsa Daley-Ward…

A “stunning excavator of human heat and light… Daley-Ward’s verse is an unfaltering force of truth on the page, celebrated both by her 125,000 Instagram followers and literary critics ranging from Elle to The Paris Review.”
– HuffPost

The Guardian Interview: “People are afraid to tell the truth. But I don’t care. It’s boring otherwise...” Yrsa Daley-Ward, poet, feminist, model and LGBTQ activist, spelling out some hard truths

From Her Publisher, Penguin Random House:

“This June, Penguin will publish The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir, which, in both prose and verse, reveal the inspiration behind many of Daley-Ward’s poems: her thorny and hardscrabble adolescence as a bright, wildly imaginative yet troubled first-generation British black girl in Chorley, England.

Through powerful, poignant vignettes, The Terrible evokes the pain and thrill of girlhood and the fear and power that come with being a woman. Daley-Ward was one of only a few black children in a poor, white, working class town, raised by her strict, devout Seventh-Day Adventist grandparents, then later by her single mother. A voracious reader with a pure imagination who saw unicorns in the garden with her little brother, Daley-Ward was forced into adulthood at an early age, often sexualized and objectified by older men.

Sometimes truly harrowing, other times inspirational, The Terrible reveals Yrsa’s acute understanding of herself and of her liminal surroundings: “Secretly we all know the bad things that are about to / happen. It’s already inside us, some coding in the body.“

Daley-Ward does not question why pain and beauty enter our lives, but instead, how they can remake us. With a rare talent for mining the childlike wonder and sorrow in the everyday, Daley-Ward’s story echoes the experiences of sexual misconduct that women are speaking about all over the country, and will resonate with anyone who has experienced suffering.